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Jaime Fuller

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When Congress heads out on summer vacation and the typically-frenetic news cycle is barely chugging along, it's hard to keep tabs on some of the biggest political issues, like immigration, health care, and the environment. With so few new developments, can you blame us? It's especially difficult with the sequester, which was flying under the radar even before our representatives went on break. The $1 trillion automatic spending cuts, which began on March 1, have slowly chipped away at government programs in ways that may seem invisible to many people. But peel back the conventional wisdom curtain shrouding the Beltway, and the sequester doesn't quite deserve the "Mission Accomplished" banner The Wall Street Journal gave it yesterday. Sure, many governmental agencies have been able to reduce the number of furlough days for their employees, but local news outlets continue to carry distressing stories about the costs of slashed budgets on a weekly basis. Fifty-six children are being...

Today, a federal judge ruled that the New York City Police Department's (NYPD) controversial stop-and-frisk program unconstitutionally targets minorities; hundreds of thousands of people are stopped every year for little or no reason. Being stopped is most certainly what the judge called a "demeaning and humiliating experience," but it is a humiliation from which white New Yorkers have been largely exempt. After millions of stops over the last decade, things are poised to change. The New York Civil Liberties Union recently compiled a detailed report on the NYPD's stop-and-frisk efforts, and the data is troubling, if not particularly surprising. On the streets of New York City in 2012, police officers stopped and questioned individuals 532,911 times. That means that nearly 1,500 times a day, someone on a New York City street is answering to police officers not because they're a suspect in a particular crime, but usually because of what the police call "furtive movements." This 2012...

In 1995, Abe Pollin, then-owner of the Washington Bullets, announced that he had become increasingly uncomfortable with the team's name, particularly since Washington, D.C., like many large cities, was beset by gun violence. A contest was held to find a new name, and by 1997 the Bullets had become the Wizards. While some people would like to have kept the old name, the whole process was relatively painless. Today, another of Washington's sports teams is facing increasing controversy over its name. The main difference is that Dan Snyder, the owner of the Redskins (and someone widely reviled in Washington for a whole host of reasons), is adamant that as long as he owns the team, it will never, ever, ever change its name. As former Prospect editor Michael Tomasky explained not long ago, the man who gave the Redskins their name, former owner, George Preston Marshall, "was one of the most despicable racists in the American sporting arena of the entire 20th century," an ardent...

Four years ago, Democratic representatives went home for the August recess and found themselves under assault from angry Tea Partiers, who took over town meetings with shouting and fist-shaking over the Affordable Care Act in particular, and more generally, the theft of their country by the foreign Muslim usurper Barack Obama. This August, however, it's Republicans who are under attack by some of those same people. At one town meeting after another, hard-right Republican House members are being confronted by constituents accusing them of not being quite doctrinaire and reckless enough (see here , or here , or here ). Once again the immediate topic is Obamacare, but now the question isn't whether the law should pass, but whether Republicans should shut down the government in a futile attempt to defund it. The members catching the most heat are those who argue that shutting down the government is useless, because Barack Obama is never going to sign a budget that defunds his greatest...

Last summer, the slew of wacky sitcom extras known as the GOP presidential slate realized their time was up. By summer, as normal people started going to the pool, Mitt Romney had the spotlight to himself and the other could-have-beens began fading into the background. But just when you thought they'd lost all relevance, the GOP gang is back (minus Mitt, who just might be eating alone at Qdoba ). Perhaps thinking that The Smurfs 2 was in fact an invitation to re-enter national consciousness, almost all of the losing candidates are suddenly getting new attention. There was the buzz after Herman Cain sent an erectile dysfunction ad to his mailing list and later as details emerged on a House ethics investigation into Michelle Bachmann’s affairs. And Saturday, Rick Perry got in on the action. He gave his audience a dose of déjà vu when he forgot which state he was in. “There are many other states that embrace those conservative values, the approach we’ve taken over the years,” he said at...